Price transparency in hospitals and providing a penalty. (FE)

What it would have done

Summary by the Legislative Reference Bureau, the Legislature's nonpartisan drafting office. It's their wording, not ours.

This bill creates several requirements for hospitals to provide cost information for certain items and services provided by the hospital. Under the bill, each hospital must make publicly available a digital file in a machine-readable format that contains a list of standard charges for certain items and services provided by the hospital and a consumer-friendly list of standard charges for certain shoppable services. “Standard charge” is defined to mean the regular rate established by the hospital for an item or service provided to a specific group of paying patients and includes certain price information, including the gross charge, the payor-specific negotiated charge, and the discounted cash price. “Shoppable service” is defined to mean a service that may be scheduled by a health care consumer in advance. If the Department of Health Services determines that a hospital is not in compliance with any of the price transparency requirements specified in the bill, the bill requires DHS to take certain actions, including providing a written notice to the hospital, requesting a corrective action plan from the hospital, or imposing a penalty. The bill establishes escalating penalties for violations of the hospital price transparency requirements specified in the bill based on the hospital's bed count, from $600 for each day in which a hospital with 30 beds or fewer violates the hospital price transparency requirements under the bill up to $10,000 for each day in which a hospital with greater than 550 beds violates the hospital price transparency requirements under the bill. The bill also requires DHS to maintain a publicly available list of hospitals that have been found to have violated any of the price transparency requirements specified in the bill.

Under the bill, the list of standard charges must be available at all times to the public in a machine-readable format, must be displayed in a prominent location on the home page of the hospital's website, and must include certain information, including a description of each hospital item or service provided and any code used by the hospital for purposes of accounting or billing. Further, the list of standard charges must meet certain criteria, including that it must be available free of charge and without having to establish a user account or password, that the list is available without having to submit personal identifying information, that the list is digitally searchable, and that the list is accessible to a commercial operator of an Internet search engine as necessary for the search engine to index the list and display the list as a result in response to a search query of a user of the search engine. The list of standard charges must be updated at least once each year.

Who's behind it

18 representatives are its authors⁠. 17 are Republicans and 1 is a Democrat.

9 more lawmakers signed on in support⁠.

What it would cost

State agencies filed a cost estimate. Each opens as a PDF from the Legislature.

• Fiscal Estimate From DHS